The Week In Garbage Men: Why Did The Mean Feminists Murder This Nice Lady Homemaker Poet?

Hello and welcome to the Week in Garbage Men! This week we are taking a break from the manosphere and into the equally misogynistic realm of the lowly esteemed National Review — where one Jeremy Carl is very mad about how feminists and the left drove poet Phyllis McGinley into obscurity, because of how we hate motherhood.

The gist of this essay is that Phyllis McGinley was a very popular poet, with many bestsellers, who was beloved by Kirk Douglas and all the people, but — unlike Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton — is no longer famous, because people on the left didn’t care for her politics.

No, what consigned McGinley to the dustbin of literary history was her politics. And in the un-personing of McGinley, we can get a glimpse of the Left’s simultaneous ruthlessness and cultural hegemony. Simply put, McGinley’s thought crime was that she was a happy, Christian, suburban mother and housewife who extolled both her life in the suburbs and traditional roles for women. For the Left, her failure to be miserable and angry at her situation was an unforgivable sin. The erasure of her voice and what it represented is a sobering thought for conservatives on this Mother’s Day. As with much else in our culture, absent voices like McGinley’s, we look at motherhood, even, through a left-wing lens.

Carl insists that her style of “light verse” was not to blame for her lack of recognition after her death in 1978, although one of the poems he cites as an example of her work, in which she tries to rhyme the words “lance” and “tolerance,” begs to differ:

The other day I chanced to meet / An angry man upon the street /
A man of wrath, a man of war / A man who truculently bore / Over his shoulder, like a lance / A banner labeled “Tolerance.”